Most of the commentary about Janet Yellen, President Obama's historic choice to lead the Federal Reserve, is focused on her views about controlling inflation and unemployment, the Fed's twin mandate. (And here, promisingly, the "dovish" Yellen has said clearly that she is more concerned about unemployment, which is a huge problem, than she is about inflation, which presently is not.)

But another huge part of the Fed's job, especially since the 2008 financial crisis, is re-regulation of the banking system and Wall Street, where Yellen will finish the task that Ben Bernanke started. And here, too, while her track record is not quite as pronounced as it is on monetary policy, she is expected to be very aggressive in reining in risky practices. Yellen, who is almost certain to be confirmed by the Senate, may turn out to be even bolder in her prescriptions than Bernanke or the Obama administration have been, according to officials who have watched Yellen from the inside of the Fed during her three years as vice chairman.

For now, Wall Street is reacting mostly favorably to Yellen's long-anticipated appointment, thanks to her dovish views on inflation and the likelihood that she will not support "tapering" off Bernanke's quantitative easing program, so as to spike the economy's still-tepid growth and ease long-term unemployment.

But the banking community may not quite know what it is getting.

Yellen's views are considered very close to those of Daniel Tarullo, a progressive-leaning Fed governor and expert on global financial regulation whom Bernanke has deputized to oversee new banking and capital standards. In her public remarks, Yellen has echoed Tarullo's push for higher capital standards for "systemically important" or too-big-to-fail banks, and his concerns about curtailing the unstable short-term funding sources of too-big-to-fail banks. Tarullo has been more aggressive than the Obama administration in proposing "a set of complementary policy measures" that goes beyond the Dodd-Frank law. Among them: limiting the expansion of big banks by restricting the funding they get from sources other than traditional federally insured deposits.

Yellen, in an important speech in Shanghai, China in June, went beyond what Bernanke has said by explicitly endorsing some of Tarullo's efforts, saying, "I'm not convinced that the existing SIFI [systemically important financial institutions] regulatory work plan, which moves in the right direction, goes far enough." She also spoke of doing much more, as Tarullo has, to constrain the "shadow banking" sector that caused so much trouble in 2008, including broker-dealers and money market funds. Yellen said "a major source of unaddressed risk" is the hundreds of billions of dollars of short-term securities financing used by these firms, adding: "Regulatory reform mostly passed over these transactions."

Michael Greenberger, a former deputy director of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and a leading voice for more transparent regulation of derivatives and other arcane Wall Street products, says that Yellen backed his stand for a tougher Dodd-Frank law than the Obama administration, Senate, and House were advocating back in 2010—a time when a fierce fight raged over the historic legislation to reorder the financial system. "I told her about weaknesses in the then existing Senate draft bills and the House bill. She was clearly sympathetic to my concerns, which, in turn, were a reflection of progressive legislative advocacy at that time," Greenberger said this week, recalling a talk he and Yellen had at the so-called Minsky conference in New York, where she gave the keynote address (noteworthy in itself, given that it is named for the late economist Hyman Minsky, who presciently described how financial markets are inherently unstable). Adds Greenberger: "The Obama Administration was not being particularly helpful about these substantive concerns. Compared to the powers that be at that time on the Hill and at the White house, she was a breath of fresh air."

Yellen is thus likely to continue a distinguished line of female regulators who have demonstrated a striking degree of vision, courage and integrity in taking on one of the most chauvinistic of industries, Wall Street. Among her predecessors and peers: new Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who has used her position on the Banking Committee to dress down Wall Street CEOs and the prosecutors who have failed to go after them; Sheila Bair, the former chairwoman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. who angered then-Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner by pushing for harsher treatment of banks during Obama's first term; retired regulator Brooksley Born, who like Bair ran up against accusations that she wasn't a "team player" in the old boys' club when she sought to rein in over-the-counter derivatives trading back in the 1990s; and most recently Mary Jo White, the no-nonsense head of the SEC who has warned she's going to crack down much harder on Wall Street fraud.

Yellen, a former economist at the University of California at Berkeley, has a notable pedigree of skepticism about Wall Street's proclivities: A student of arch-market-interventionist James Tobin at Yale—who famously proposed a tax on financial transactions—she is also the wife and writing partner of George Akerlof, who shared the 2001 Nobel Prize in economics with Joseph Stiglitz for work that showed how markets can fail thanks to imperfect information. As such, she is likely to be even tougher than Bernanke, a former free-marketer and Republican nominee who changed his views somewhat after 2008 and has since turned the Fed into a major interventionist force in the economy.

The late Tobin and Akerlof fought career-long battles to make the case that financial markets work differently, and are more inherently prone to failure, than ordinary markets in goods and services. Their work has tended to back the prescription of John Maynard Keynes, as far back as the Bretton Woods conference in 1944, that "nothing is more certain than that the movement of capital funds must be regulated." In a 2010 interview, Akerlof said he "was always apoplectic" at the kind of rapid deregulation advocated by Harvard economist Larry Summers, who almost certainly would have been nominated in Yellen's place had he not backed out last month—in particular, the abrupt opening up of capital flows around the world, which has arguably led to financial bubbles in one economy after another.

While Yellen did not always act on regulation when needed—claiming that as head of the San Francisco Fed she had to wait on Washington's guidance—the record shows that she appeared to be somewhat ahead of Bernanke in appreciating the dangers of the securitization-led housing bubble. At the Fed's June 2007 she warned that the failing housing sector was the "600-pound gorilla in the room." That was only a month after Bernanke, in congressional testimony, said he saw only a "limited impact of subprime mortgages on "the broader housing market."

Yet Yellen also offered up a refreshing mea culpa after the financial collapse, telling the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission in 2010 that she "did not see and did not appreciate what the risks were with securitization, the credit ratings agencies, the shadow banking system, the S.I.V.'s [structured investment vehicles]— I didn't see any of that coming until it happened."

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Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. TheWall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

There’s no way this man could be president, right? Just look at him: rumpled and scowling, bald pate topped by an entropic nimbus of white hair. Just listen to him: ranting, in his gravelly Brooklyn accent, about socialism. Socialism!

And yet here we are: In the biggest surprise of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, this thoroughly implausible man, Bernie Sanders, is a sensation.

He is drawing enormous crowds—11,000 in Phoenix, 8,000 in Dallas, 2,500 in Council Bluffs, Iowa—the largest turnout of any candidate from any party in the first-to-vote primary state. He has raised $15 million in mostly small donations, to Hillary Clinton’s $45 million—and unlike her, he did it without holding a single fundraiser. Shocking the political establishment, it is Sanders—not Martin O’Malley, the fresh-faced former two-term governor of Maryland; not Joe Biden, the sitting vice president—to whom discontented Democratic voters looking for an alternative to Clinton have turned.

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

An attack on an American-funded military group epitomizes the Obama Administration’s logistical and strategic failures in the war-torn country.

Last week, the U.S. finally received some good news in Syria:.After months of prevarication, Turkey announced that the American military could launch airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Syria from its base in Incirlik. The development signaled that Turkey, a regional power, had at last agreed to join the fight against ISIS.

The announcement provided a dose of optimism in a conflict that has, in the last four years, killed over 200,000 and displaced millions more. Days later, however, the positive momentum screeched to a halt. Earlier this week, fighters from the al-Nusra Front, an Islamist group aligned with al-Qaeda, reportedly captured the commander of Division 30, a Syrian militia that receives U.S. funding and logistical support, in the countryside north of Aleppo. On Friday, the offensive escalated: Al-Nusra fighters attacked Division 30 headquarters, killing five and capturing others. According to Agence France Presse, the purpose of the attack was to obtain sophisticated weapons provided by the Americans.

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

A controversial treatment shows promise, especially for victims of trauma.

It’s straight out of a cartoon about hypnosis: A black-cloaked charlatan swings a pendulum in front of a patient, who dutifully watches and ping-pongs his eyes in turn. (This might be chased with the intonation, “You are getting sleeeeeepy...”)

Unlike most stereotypical images of mind alteration—“Psychiatric help, 5 cents” anyone?—this one is real. An obscure type of therapy known as EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, is gaining ground as a potential treatment for people who have experienced severe forms of trauma.

Here’s the idea: The person is told to focus on the troubling image or negative thought while simultaneously moving his or her eyes back and forth. To prompt this, the therapist might move his fingers from side to side, or he might use a tapping or waving of a wand. The patient is told to let her mind go blank and notice whatever sensations might come to mind. These steps are repeated throughout the session.